Xavier's new Ethics/Religion and Society Lecture Series' focus is on Justice, Tolerance and Diversity

The series introduces speakers to campus on the topic for the next three years | October 27, 2011

In September, Xavier began a new Ethics/Religion and Society Lecture Series called “Justice, Tolerance and Diversity” which spans 2011 through 2014. The series debates the meanings of justice, tolerance and diversity and their interrelationships. How do different definitions of—or approaches to—justice affect the understandings of tolerance and diversity? How does one’s understanding of diversity affect one’s view of justice? Which differences are most significant and which must be tolerated?

These lectures are free and open to the public and are held in the Schiff Conference Center in Xavier’s Cintas Center. Learn more about the speakers at the series' website.

The next speaker in the series is Russell Hittinger, a professor at the Center for Law and Religion at the University of Tulsa, who is speaking on Sunday, Oct. 30, at 7:00 p.m. about “Pope John XXIII's Vision of Moral Order: Pacem in Terris Fifty Years Later.”

Hittinger is a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in Vatican City and is on the editorial boards of The Review of Politics and The American Journal of Jurisprudence. He writes on the relation between law and revelation, and his publications include Paper Wars: Catholic Social Doctrine and the Modern State (forthcoming), The First Grace: Rediscovering Natural Law in a Post Christian Age (2007)and A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (1987).

David Solomon, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, speaks on Tuesday, Nov. 29, at 7:00 p.m. Solomon is the founder and director of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. He has been a National Endowment of Humanities Research Fellow and a University Research Fellow at Oxford University, and a Milbank Research Fellow at Boston University. He has lectured at more than 100 American and European colleges and universities. He writes on ethics and is currently writing a monograph on the recent revival of virtue ethics and two volumes of collected materials from the annual Notre Dame Conference on Medical Ethics.

The first lecturers in the series appeared in September. The first was Remi Brague, who spoke on Sept. 22. He teaches Arabic and religious philosophy at the University of Paris and the University of Munich, is one of the foremost authorities on the diversity of influences in Western civilization, particularly with regard to the relation of Islamic, Jewish and Latin sources of European culture.

Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres spoke together on Sept. 25 on “Just Diversity: Why We Need a New Grammar of Race, Class and Power.” Guinier was the first black woman professor at the Harvard Law School and was nominated by President Clinton to head the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, where her writings on race, representative democracy and affirmative action became the subject of a fierce debate. Torres, who teaches law at the University of Texas, has written extensively on critical race theory and environmental ethics and has served as president of the Association of American Law Schools and in the Justice Department and has been recognized for his work on behalf of Latino legal rights.